This Is How HPV Causes Cancer

This Is How HPV Causes Cancer

It's long been known that contracting HPV during your life can lead to an increased risk of certain forms of cancer — most notably, throat, cervical, and head and neck cancers. But, in a study released today out of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute, researchers are revealing how, exactly, the virus harms our bodies.

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"HPV can act like a tornado hitting the genome, disrupting and rearranging nearby host-cell genes," says David Symer, MD, PhD, one of the coauthors of the study. Researchers observed the ways that the HPV virus actually inserted itself into human DNA — effectively disrupting the normal functioning of the cells it invaded.

These changes produced cancer in a couple of different ways — either by causing overproduction of cancer-causing genes or the disruption and silencing of cancer-suppressing genes. This new research offers scientists an important window into the mechanism by which HPV — and possibly other viruses — cause disease. And, it highlights the importance in developing and promoting vaccines that can stop HPV before it even starts. (Eureka Alert)